domenica 23 ottobre 2011

Not a Good Teacher

This is my studio during a watercolour lesson. I started to form groups in 2008, when, opening my art study, I had to find money to pay the rent. Everything started when a friend almost forced me to give her lessons.
I have always worked as a teacher of literary topics and, as an artist, I was invited in elementary schools to talk about my experience and draw with children.
But teaching to adults...this is another thing! They are very demanding! They have an intellectual approach, and I have had to prepare "proper" lessons". They most of the time do not like experimenting: they want to know "everything about"!!
It was a good challenge for me: I went back to study (and consequently to planning and fixing)...just to understand that most of the time you do a better job when you get rid of everything!
But I think that this is a good starting point. You have to learn grammar rules and so on when studying a language (you can see I come from literary studies...!) and then you can become a writer or use a language for whatever you like, ...the other way round is reserved to children and...artists...but here we open a neverending debate!!!!
So I teach my students and do exercise with them...beacause I am a lifelong student and I love learning new aspects of the same things...

Here you can see two of my students: we work on different subjects alternitively: still life, portrait, landscape, book illlustrations using different techniques...
The woman who drew the portrait on the left was a beginner (would you believe it?) The other has been with me for two years now.
There is one important thing I have been learning in these years' experience: I can easily pass my knowledge, but pass my love, my art, my way of working, my doubts too, this I can't: I become shy.
Sometimes I am asked questions I cannot answer .. Last monday while explaining how to draw shades, a student asked me how one could geometrically calculate the end of the shadow, with a given direction of light. I anwered, "I do it by the eye, by practical obsevation!"...I realized it was not a good answer, they wanted the Rule, and I underestimated this bit!...so once I got home I went back to study.. . only to conclude it was interesting to know it but quite useless when drawing!
I don't need the Rule to make a good drawing, this I will tell them next monday...just after having told them the geometrical bit!!!